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Fiddling
I've played violin for a bit more than 30 years -- except that for about 20 of them, I wasn't playing violin. Suzuki lessons from about 5 years old to about 14 years old, quit in disgust, took it back up when I was 35. I have a lot of fun with it nowadays.
If you're looking for abc notation of fiddle tunes, be sure to check out The Fiddler's Companion.
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
I'm pretty happy with this. I tried putting a solo in but it just doesn't work that way. So I'm just playing it straight through. A couple of bars of solo before the first verse might be something to think about.
Background on this song: it is by an old Country band called the Stanley Brothers, but I have never heard them play it. I heard John Miller's cover on the same disc where I heard The Louisville Burglar -- Thanks Jeffrey! This was Sylvia's favorite song for a while so we listened to it a lot.
The cool thing about this song is, I had been looking for a fiddle part for a while; and then yesterday I just heard the part exactly in my head, and how it would fit in with the vocal. I think it sounds really good together.
Update: Huh, I just listened to the John Miller version again for the first time in a while, and my cover is different in some pretty key ways. That's nice to see. He does a two-bar intro, I'll try and add that next time I play this.
posted morning of December 24th, 2007: Respond ➳ More posts about Music
Spare yourself and don't listen to this one -- very rough. It is a favorite song of mine though, I want to keep working on it. The idea is to integrate the voice with the viola, and have a dialog between the voice and the violin.
Update: see take 2 for the working version. Much better, cleaner, more successful.
posted morning of December 25th, 2007: Respond ➳ More posts about Songs
Still not perfect -- there are some missed entrances, the fiddle solo lags in places, I still don't have any decent recording equipment -- but this is totally on track for what I want to sound like. Something I am really happy about is the variation in meter from verse to verse -- I was able to work out occasionally inserting an extra measure in key places and I think it came out really well. The drones are a little annoying without a fiddle on top of them but I just didn't want to try that right now. Maybe another day.
I sort of think this might be a Childe Ballad, not sure though. Janis introduced me to it, we've been playing it together for a couple of years. Came out pretty well, though I'm not too confident with the lyric. Janis usually sings it.
Rehearsal tonight with Jerry went really well -- we played three songs and a meandering improvisation and we're going to do the three songs at the open mic tomorrow:
"Weary Day", with Jerry singing -- this is going to be awesome.
"Hard Times Come Again No More", with Jerry singing -- potentially great, if I can get the viola part straight. I think it will work.
"Louisville Burglar", with me singing -- this song works much better if I'm not trying to play during the vocal. Really fun to jam with Jerry on solos.
So friends and neighbors: here's your chance to hear us at our first appearance, before we get famous. It'll be at (the not long for this world) Here's to the Arts, 97 Baker St. in Maplewood; we'll probably play around 9:30.
Turns out "(not long for this world)" is not quite accurate. Art had been having some trouble negotiating a new lease and it looked like he might be evicted; but he has secured a month-to-month lease, so he's still there at least for the time being.
Our set tonight was pretty excellent all things (such as that we had only played together on three occasions prior to the performance, with actual serious practicing going on on only one of those occasions) considered. The weakest of the three songs was "Hard Times", principally because (a) I don't know the part well enough and (b) I can't play vibrato, which was pretty strongly called for. The fast songs were great, both of us were really tuned in to each other and to the songs.
Later we played two songs I did not know, "Cocaine Habit" (vaguely anti-drug song from the '30s) and "Bed on Your Floor" (similar in theme to "Palette on Your Floor" but totally different music). The set was extremely rough but fun -- I thought "Bed on Your Floor" has real possibilities if we practice it a bit.
"Vinny Video" was filming the evening's performances and promised to send me a DVD. Who knows, maybe we will put it on YouTube!
So I'm watching Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and thinking "Hm, all this shooting sure is getting confusing" and wander off. I bet there's a soundtrack record, now that'd be something to listen to.
Worked out one of the songs (possibly the theme?) on fiddle, it sounds pretty good as a short melody and some nice variations as well.
Wow, look! This is my nine-hundred and ninety-ninth post to this blog. The counter's about to roll over. Fun! Just in time for the new year.
So I came up with a little air for viola; I am inaugurating my new policy of giving my songs titles, by calling this one "Sally's Sleeping"; as Mr. Fritz observed in comments a few days ago, fiddlers name their tunes "after any damn thing". This is my first song (a) in 12/8 meter and (b) for which I was able to correctly work out notating the rhythm without help from ABCEdit's playback feature.
I found a streaming music player which is not dependent on Windows MediaPlayer, so I am going to try using it. Please let me know if either you were not able to play my music files before, and now you are, or you were able to play them before and now you are not. Thanks!
Here is the music for it, ABC format and PDF. Note that I didn't play exactly the same fourth bar that is written down; the whole point is to play a different variation every time.
posted morning of December 30th, 2007: Respond ➳ More posts about The site
So I was working on a short air for viola this morning and I went to write it down; and I realized it was almost exactly the same song as Sally's Sleeping, except in 4/4 time instead of 12/8. That one difference makes it sound like quite a distinct song! (Well also I'm playing it in a different key and faster.) Here they are together:
Update: added a new melody to the Sally cycle. See new post for the recording.
Looking at the two side by side a little more, I realize there is another distinction: "Sally's Sleeping" starts on the tonic, and "Sally Woke Up" is a similar pattern of notes but starting on the third. This distinction must be something like an inversion but I'm not sure what words I would use in talking about it.
(Sylvia says, "So you mean, it's like Junie B. Jones and then Junie B., First Grader?" Exactly.)
Gee, I hope I have more than a single melody in my head. The one I wrote out this evening is very similar in structure to "Sally's Sleeping" and "Sally Woke Up"; I am calling this one "Sally's Dreaming" (ABC format, PDF). Here are the three of them together:
